Today it is my extreme pleasure to host the first of what I hope will be many batches of audio streams from Roadburn 2012. This year, instead of links, I’m honored to host the audio streams themselves, which you’ll find on the players below. Extra special thanks to Walter and the Roadburn crew, and to Marcel van de Vondervoort and his team for recording these sets.

Please enjoy:

Alkerdeel – Roadburn 2012

Ancestors – Roadburn 2012

Barn Owl

Black Cobra – Roadburn 2012

Bong – Roadburn 2012

Horisont – Roadburn 2012

Sigiriya – Roadburn 2012

YOB – The Unreal Never Lived live at Roadburn 2012

Read The Obelisk’s coverage of Roadburn 2012 here.

As one of two guitarists for the prolific San Francisco outfit Barn Owl — who released Lost in the Glare late last year on Thrill Jockey (review here) — Evan Caminiti is already no stranger to textured atmospherics and a heady sense of drone. His upcoming third solo album, however, pushes that to new levels of ambient contemplation. Night Dust might be minimalist if it wasn’t so evocative. Caminiti will release the 10-track collection as his label debut for Immune Recordings on May 15 and has put together a sun-baked video for the song “Returning Spirits,” which is the second and longest cut from the record.

Check it out below, followed by some PR wire-type info, courtesy of Immune:

With Night Dust, his debut for Immune, Caminiti shifted the focus away from amplifier worship and the desert themes his work is often associated with to focus on texture, fractured dub techniques, and spacious electric guitar compositions. Recorded entirely to four-track cassette, Caminiti embraced the limitations of the medium and warped the original sound sources with analog electronics, searching for beauty in the hazy and degraded sounds. Inspiration came from smoky blue hues and washed out lights of some of the ‘80s’ best vampire movies, which contributes to the visually evocative narrative flow the album possesses.

Night Dust was mastered and cut to vinyl by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Duplates & Mastering in Berlin and will be released on both limited LP with download and cassette with download. Caminiti will continue his busy touring schedule with Barn Owl and plans to also perform solo in support of Night Dust.

Although still centered around the guitars of Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras, the second album from San Francisco’s Barn Owl through Thrill Jockey finds the duo beginning to further branch out of themselves. Lost in the Glare maintains the heady soundscapes of its predecessor, 2010’s Ancestral Star, but revels in deceptively complex “minimalism” that includes manipulated cassettes, bass clarinet, and (gasp!) drums, which serve as well-placed landmarks for the full-length’s eight tracks. There are still plenty of stretches where it’s just Caminiti and Porras, but the deviation from that formula is what gives Lost in the Glare its character, which nestles somewhere between Hex-era Earth’s Americana and the ethereal inaccessibility of SunnO)))’s amplifier overload. Barn Owl place themselves in solid company sound-wise, and don’t so much innovate the notion of what drone is as add their personality to it – I acknowledge that might be splitting hairs, but what I mean is that as evocative as some of this material is, it’s that evocation that’s most particular to what Barn Owl does, rather than the sounds themselves. There are a lot of people who plug in guitars and sustain notes for unreasonable amounts of time, feed through effects and loops and build impossible tension and crescendos therefrom, but far fewer who do it as richly as does Barn Owl on Lost in the Glare.

Still, especially for the material on which Jacob Felix Heule contributes drums, the principal point of comparison is Earth. Naturally, those tracks – “Turiya,” “Midnight Tide,” and “Devotion II” most prominently, though gong washes show up on “Devotion I” as well along with tanpura courtesy of The Alps’ Michael Elrod – come off as more structured than some of the others, but even opener “Pale Star,” which is among the farther-ranging cuts on Lost in the Glare, has some sense of progression to it, and when the abrasive feedback cuts out with just under a minute left, there’s a sense that the song is over and what you’re hearing is a sustained conclusion. Such is the method by which the album teaches the listener how to read it. Barn Owl follow “Pale Star” with the aforementioned “Turiya” and move briskly through the song at a pace set by Heule, with Caminiti and Porras playing distinctly off each other rather than working in tandem to create a general wash as they did on the opener. It’s not fast by any stretch, but “Turiya” is one of the album’s most active moments, with Heule keeping time on the ride and adding tom flourishes to the midsection. With the gradual development of “Devotion I,” the lushness of “Pale Star” is affirmed. The song starts with echoing guitar and moves gracefully into psychedelic melodiousness; the gong and tanpura giving a classic Western feel to classically Eastern ideas. Caminiti and Porras don’t so much step aside for Elrod as they did on “Turiya” for Heule’s drumming, but the fluidity of the former’s contribution and punctuating nature of the latter’s add to the overall versatility of the droning. It’s as peaceful as it is complex.

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Technically speaking, I don’t think I’m cool enough to even talk about bands like this, but the echoing tones of San Franciscan duo Barn Owl nonetheless get suitable visual accompaniment in the new video for the track “Turiya,” so I figured I’d post it. The song comes from Barn Owl‘s new album on Thrill Jockey, Lost in the Glare, which — by some bizarre cosmic coincidence — happens to come out today, Sept. 13. Imagine that.

Here’s the clip, directed by John Davis: